likn's blog

Just a quick note, there's been some follow-up since Google announced the Google App Sync for Microsoft Outlook this past week. Brian Osborne at Geek.com has written that some companies use Outlook with a number of plug-ins which may not work at all with Google App Sync. Deal breaking plugins include: salesforce.com,WebEx, Acrobat PDF Maker. But as is often the case many enterprises including Higher Ed run Outlook without any plug-ins whatsoever.

We will see if this is everything it promises to be. I have to say this makes the decision whether or not to provision email accounts to Faculty & Staff to Gmail much more interesting. Especially for IT Depts. who depend completely on Outlook as an email client, this provides another path to outsource email services. And best of all I can fully appreciate the difference between IMAP4 versus Microsoft's MAPI protocols for retrieving new email messages and calendar appointments. I have both an Exchange account and an IMAP email account that I use through Microsoft Outlook.

No doubt a few of the institutions around are upgrading their Blackboard Enterprise systems to version 8. But the number scheme is confounding due to the inclusion of WebCT's Vista and Campus Editions both having their numbered versions sync'd up with Blackboard Enterprise. Nowhere on the publicly available Blackboard Support pages can you find a final word on whether or not Blackboard Enterpise 8 is supporting Firefox 3. It doesn't appear that Firefox 3 is supported by the version 8 editions of WebCT Vista (now  Blackboard Vista) and WebCT CE (now Blackboard CE). I'm sure any one of us could do a 'seat of the pants' style test of Firefox 3 with Blackboard Enterprise 8 (I'd say 15 minutes worth of testing let's say). But undoubtedly it would be really cool if Blackboard QA or Blackboard Support could publish a final table matrix showing which if ANY of the currently supported products do support Firefox 3. I dont' know how anyone else feels about this, but I know we're going to get questions as Faculty return and start setting up their course materials in Blackboard.

This is very much in the spirit of Jon's underlying goal to 'narrate your work'. Not just the task at hand but the greater career you find yourself in. It works at the Macro and Micro levels. In this blog entry about mathcasts he tries to really stress the benefit of seeing and hearing the steps one goes through to solve a mathematical problem. I can tell you as a student of calculus I wished many times I could play back some of the double integrals the grad student ran through while I was at Virginia Tech. Who knows what benefit I might have derived from that review?

Check out the article on GapMinder as presented by Hans Rosling at the TED conference

The article starts out with a data analysis provided by Hans Rosling at TED Talks entitled:

"Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen"

Jon Udell's feeling is this is narrative of data he's seen. And it's not just the tool he uses (GapMinder) it's how he presents it. But screencasts are no different than Hans Rosling using GapMinder live in front of an audience. He's narrating the work of the UN department of statistics on World Health. He's using the tool to tell us what you really can see when the data is used to visualize trends. Screencasting should attempt to reach the same level of communicating things clearly. I watched the video and went to Google to try GapMinder myself. It is in a word mind-boggling the different combinations you can come up with to look at all the data.

Check out Jon Udell's compiled article on screencasting from 2005

This is a pretty good sampler of Jon's initial foray into screencasts. He had some desire to 'narrate' the history of edits on the Wikipedia entry for "Heavy Metal Umlauts". As an example it's both funny and informative. But as Jon discovered recording a screencast is a non-trivial task at best. Due in part to the fragmentary nature of current offerings. Everything is geared to the software demo or training tutorial. Screencasts can be lumped into that same generalized case. But for the stuff Jon was doing, it was very limiting. Ultimately Jon decided that the Windows Media Encoder was by far an away the best available screen recording utility available. But editing back in the audio track can be problematic. So there is no magic bullet per se when it comes to creating screencasts, but Jon has tried just about every product out there. I hope to profit by his example.

There is no better resource right now on the web than Jon Udell's blog entries surrounding screen-casting. I think his workflow is generally scalable and applicable to a University setting. I'll be editing this entry to add some relevant links.

I am happy to say I will now be using both my personal Radio.Userland and Educause Blogs for posting on topics appropriate for each forum. There's a number of things that catch my attention, but aren't always compelling for my personal blog and vice versa. Some of the rants I have aren't applicable to Educause, so now I have a channel appropriate for those pet peeves and personal rants as well.